Your marketing and business resource to accelerate sales through credibility.

22 posts from April 2007

Monday, April 30, 2007

Great advice from
John Jantsch over at Duct
Tape Marketing. I have been talking ad nauseum about the importance of
research and keeping on top of the editorial and blogger landscape. The
following is not only great resource for you and but also to send the results
to your clients, or internal corporate constituents. The idea is letting
technology aggregate relevant industry content so you don’t have to.

Why do you need to
keep up? Get out of the myopic box of your own company and product. Explore the
opinions and news of the industry and your competitors. It will open your mind
to new ideas, unique messaging and what your customers are interested in. Become
a hero to your clients by delivering the breaking news in their industry.

Just
when you thought you were getting the hang of using RSS as a research tool,
someone, like me, comes along and tells you that it's not enough.

Now
it's become ultra easy to use RSS technology to create individual feeds of
information and supply them to your best clients. You know they want to figure
this RSS thing out but just can't seem to get around to it. So, do it for them.

Here's
what I would suggest. Go to www.mysyndicaat.com
and create personalized, search specific, RSS feeds, mash them together and
deliver customized information to your clients on a daily basis. The current
trendy name for this is a newsradar

Syndicaat
allows you to easily mash multiple feeds together creating one very focused and
personalized feed. (Yahoo Pipes does this as well, but my results with it have
been spotty)

So,
let's say you have a client that produces tents for active outdoor types. You
can search very specific terms and phrases in Google News, Yahoo News,
Bloglines, Technorati, Google Blogs, Outdoor Forums, and anything else that
produces an RSS feed and mash all the content about your client, their
competitors, the industry, specific keywords and phrases, you name in, into one
digestible, personalized newsfeed that changes daily. (Don't tell your client
how easy this is, just do it and bill them for it - they'll thank you.)

Talk
about a great way to get a competitive edge. It's like creating personalized
publications for each client or each marketing segment you serve. What if you
did this for your prospects as a way to show them what you could do? You can
make all this content public or create private password protected feeds. You
can also republish the RSS feed and data on any web page on your site using
simple javascript or even Feedburner's Buzz Boost and then put it in your
client's private page on your website. So now they come to your website for
their industry news everyday - you got to like the sound of that.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Chris Brown over at the Branding & Marketing Blog
hits the nail right on the head with her post below. Stop living in what I call
tactic land and develop a strong, sound strategy that the tactics can live in.
The strategy is the structure upon which all activity is filtered through. When
a company has no strategy, efficiencies decrease because there is no sounding
board for whether a tactic makes sense or not..

While Chris is specifically speaking to the need for web
sites, it addresses this issue nicely. Thanks Chris for the following insight:

Sometimes a business
professional will come to me and ask if we "do websites"... and if we
do create websites, "how much?"

My answer is "Yes" and "It depends."

To me it's much more important to make sure the marketing strategy and
marketing program aligns with the objectives of the sales department to support
the overall company's strategy, than it is to "do a website."
Otherwise, a new website is created, looks and works great, but the actual
impact to the profitability overtime doesn't improve. I don't recommend doing a
new website unless you it's part of your overall program. You want it to
positively impact your overall sales & marketing goals. Tactics without
strategy is wasting your marketing budget.

I've heard it called "Ready, fire, aim." You know what I mean.

To read the entire post click here and scroll down to
the April 24th post

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Here is a perfect story of credibility branding in action,
in particular the part about becoming an influencer yourself. The post below
was offered by Bill
McCloskey at Bill’s Blog

Here is how my credibility branding model sums up his
anecdotal story:

·Take what you know a lot about and start
offering your insights as a commentator to publications, influencers, bloggers
etc

·Start a blog! Start writing about what you know

·Breaking news strategies, leverage breaking news
to offer yourself as an authority to comment; be a talking head on the big news broadcasts SPECIAL OFFER click here to
download a free PDF on the basics of how to execute this strategyjust click here to download)

Why do all this? This is part of an overarching strategy of
adding credibility to your brand. This is not a trick, manipulation or spin it
is leveraging what you know into a form that gets your insights and expertise
out there, enhancing the credibility of your company and products (AKA your
brand). This added credibility allows users to fast track the decision making
process. You are the one they want because the trust factor is in play.

I
started writing for publications in the early 90’s. At the time I had just
started working in the new and niche world of high end 3D animation. One day I
noticed that one of the sales guys at the company I worked for had an article
published in the main trade journal. Using his name as a way in, I called up
the editor and pitched them a story. The upshot was they agreed to keep it in
their files as an “evergreen” story, one that could be run at anytime and if
they had space to fill, they’d use it. Of course, no money was offered.

A
few months later I received a solicitation in the mail about subscribing to a
new publication called 3D Design Magazine. I called them up and said: “I’m not
interested in subscribing, but I’d love to write for you.” My background, plus
the fact I had already placed an article with their competitor, proved a
winning combination. I was offered a job as a columnist and two days later they
called again to say their technical editor had left and would I be interested
in that as well. And so I started writing monthly columns on 3D and eventually
pitched them on the idea of a series on a new 3D for the Web technology called
VRML. My writings on VRML made me a VIP in the early world of rich media on the
web and led to one of the first really great gigs of my career: VRML Evangelist
for SGI and put me at the birth of rich media advertising for the web.

Two things come up for me, one is this is so full of
marketing jargon. Marketing savvy C-level executives will likely get this but
even some of those might have to read this a couple of times. It isn’t that
hard to understand but as I have been saying in previous
posts, can’t we translate this into simpler terms?

Let’s take these statements:

"Segway's a good product, but not a strong brand for
that reason”

“Best brands are blessed with both relevance and
differentiation”

They make sense once you think about it, and in fact are
VERY important statements. But I think they can be discussed in more
straightforward way. This is the old argument of marketing needing marketing
for itself.

What they mean with those statements is; deliver a great
product that solves a clear problem. If one of those two things is not
happening, you have a BIG marketing challenge on your hands.

The article is right on the money on a number of fronts.

·Don’t go big just because it is easy, like
buying a big campaign because marketing is now the final solution to solve the
bottom line problem. (Have you ever noticed how marketing is the first thing to
cut then the last thing used to save the company?)

·Boil the value you are offering down to 2 – 3
simple words. This is good for customers but even better for employees who also
represent your brand on a daily basis.

·Plan ahead and decide where you want to be (check
back here tomorrow–Thursday– for a post describing a exercise right from my book how to do
this)

·In order to do any of the above you must KNOW
YOUR CUSTOMER and how your product will serve them.

ALLEN
ADAMSON, MANAGING DIRECTOR OFthe New York
office of brand development consultancy Landor Associates, used the Segway
personal transportation machine as an example of a brand that failed because it
has a high degree of differentiation but very little relevance.

"Segway's
a good product, but not a strong brand for that reason," he said.

The
message was part of a conversation in the packed Manhattan Grand Hyatt
convention hall on the benefits of simplicity in building a brand and why
companies like Apple and Google or Timberland, for that matter, succeed by
simplifying consumer choices and the brand's own proposition. "If the
brand doesn't make it easy, it won't work."

Speaking
at yesterday's Association of National Advertisers Conference, Adamson argued
that a brand can be successful if that formula is reversed, but the best brands
are blessed with both relevance and differentiation.

"The
most common pattern we see is companies who have strong awareness, nonetheless
continuously worried about awareness, who do things like get stadium-naming
rights. They focus on that because it's easy to do," he said.
"Dealing with the issue of differentiation and how to deliver it is
complex and hard to execute."

The
problem, he said, is that few companies are able to boil down their brand and
what makes it different to a few simple words. "We'll sit down with a CEO
and ask what the company does that's different, and we may get something like
'innovation.' That's a popular word these days. When we speak to the executive
board of that company and ask them what innovation means, we'll get twelve
different answers."

He
said developing the brand's identity in simple terms and then creating a symbol
and/or a compelling phrase defining it is critical not just for consumers but
for employees, too--because it is clear and unambiguous, and therefore a kind
of "veni, vidi, vici" for company workers, particularly those who
deal with consumers.

"Once
you get to where your story is, you need then to get it simple, if you can't
get it down to simple idea it won't stick," he said. "If you have a brand
promise, and you have dozens or hundreds who are supposed to be delivering that
promise, you will never succeed ... if there's no clear, simple sense of what
the customer journey is."

Examples
of successful brand ideas: BP's "Beyond Petroleum" mantra; H.R.
Block's "Friendly enabler" positioning. "You need to deliver
that promise along consumer touchpoints, but the most successful brands choose
their touch points carefully," he said. "Figure out where you want to
win, and make sure you do that."

He
said a simple and clear brand premise--one that argues that a brand is
different from its competitors--starts with something that isn't fulfilled by
what's out there already. "I always think that Jerry Seinfeld would be
great at branding because he always asks the question, 'Do you ever wonder
why?' You have to get to the 'ever wonder why' phrase," he said.

As
an example, he illustrated how Timberland's rise from no-name boot brand to
fashion accessory and one of the best-known work boot brands came from an
observation by CEO Jeff Swartz.

"He
bought a shoe company in Maine, was doing pretty well--some years were good,
some bad, but he couldn't grow the business. One day he got out of a car,
stepped in a puddle and said, "Why can't I do a waterproof shoe?' The
company designed it, came up with the name Timberland."

Adamson
also gave a nod to Bose headphones, Baby Einstein and FedEx (with its brand
premise of absolute certainty) as companies that are successfully tapping a
core consumer insight. And Mazda.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Alexander Kjerulf over at Chief Happiness Officer writes a great
article on the importance of happy people in the workplace. This is both a
message for those of us to become happier in our workplace and for HR
departments and corporate managers to take a closer look at. Happy employees
mean happy, creative, efficient processes equaling happy brands. Happy brands
mean happy customers and happy bottom line profits which create happy
shareholders… ok you get the idea. Check out the Worksona
case study post to see their model as well as previous posts
on corporate cultures

Here are the 10 most
important reasons why happiness at work is the #1 productivity
booster.

1: Happy
people work better with others
Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better
relations at work. This translates into:

·Better teamwork with your colleagues

·Better employee relations if you’re a manager

·More satisfied customers if you’re in a service
job

·Improved sales if you’re a sales person

2: Happy
people are more creative
If your productivity depends on being able to come up with new ideas, you need
to be happy at work. Check out the
research of Teresa Amibile for proof. She says:

If people are in a
good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day,
as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a
cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to
more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover,
an incubation effect, to the next day.

3: Happy
people fix problems instead of complaining about them
When you don’t like your job, every molehill looks like a mountain. It becomes
difficult to fix any problem without agonizing over it or complaining about it
first. When you’re happy at work and you run into a snafu - you just fix it.

4: Happy
people have more energy
Happy people have more energy and are therefore more efficient at everything
they do.

5: Happy
people are more optimistic
Happy people have a more positive, optimistic outlook, and as research shows
(particularly Martin
Seligman’s work in positive psychology), optimists are way more successful
and productive. It’s the old saying “Whether you believe you can or believe you
can’t, you’re probably right” all over again.

6: Happy
people are way more motivated
Low motivation means low productivity, and the only sustainable, reliable way
to be motivated at work is to be happy and like what you do. I wrote about this
in a previous post called Why
“motivation by pizza” doesn’t work.

7: Happy
people get sick less often
Getting sick is a productivity killer and if you don’t like your job you’re
more prone to contract a long list of diseases including ulcers, cancer and
diabetes. You’re also more prone to workplace stress and burnout.

One study assessed
the impact of job strain on the health of 21,290 female nurses in the US and
found that the women most at risk of ill health were those who didn’t like
their jobs. The impact on their health was a great as that associated with
smoking and sedentary lifestyles (source).

8: Happy
people learn faster
When you’re happy and relaxed, you’re much more open to learning new things at
work and thereby increasing your productivity.

9: Happy
people worry less about making mistakes - and consequently make fewer mistakes
When you’re happy at work the occasional mistake doesn’t bother you much. You
pick yourself up, learn from it and move on. You also don’t mind admitting to
others that you screwed up - you simply take responsibility, apologize and fix
it. This relaxed attitude means that less mistakes are made, and that you’re
more likely to learn from them.

10: Happy
people make better decisions
Unhappy people operate in permanent crisis mode. Their focus narrows, they lose
sight of the big picture, their survival instincts kick in and they’re more
likely to make short-term, here-and-now choices. Conversely, happy people make
better, more informed decisions and are better able to prioritize their work.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Last Thursday I wrote about blogging
for your brand and the importance of the content as a reflection of who you
are. The following article is a great example of an online debate (click the
link at the end to go to the sources and see the comment dialog with Seth. This is a great discussion about
the importance of SEO in response to a post from Seth dissing it. This dialog
between Solomon Rothman and Seth Godin never resorts to personal attacks. Solomon passionately but professionally pursues a conversation with
Seth about the importance of SEO.

Regarding the actual debate, I am also weighing in … I think Seth is dead on
in his assertion that short cuts from snake oil type SEO folks are not good. I
also agree and have mentioned this many times in this blog; delivering a
product that offers a clear benefit (return on investment) is THE most
important marketing achievement. Marketing can overcome a bad product but only
for a while. The only way to build loyal long term customers is a great
meaningful product.

Now I also agree with Solomon, SEO is an important marketing
tactic and any business owner worth his stock is investing in a top notch SEO
firm to help him drive high quality traffic using these tactics. This is not a
short cut, it is just marketing. Why would one ignore a tactic that can
increase traffic and drive brand awareness?

In the comment dialog between Soloman and Seth, Seth
mentioned that he doesn’t want an increase in traffic (in response to an offer
for a free SEO service), his blog is just a blog and he just uses it for
writing. That may be the case for Seth, but for the rest of us, our blogs are
our best strategy to impact the market, change opinion, drive new leads, and
establish the brand and the blogger
as in industry influencer. Seth may have already achieved this and is
comfortable not pursuing new readers, but the rest of us can’t be that causal.

My vote is, develop a product that is creative and
spectacular that changes peoples lives, then market the hell out of it using
all your marketing tools ESPECIALLY SEO!

Following is Solomon’s excellent overview of the importance
of SEO in response to a Post Seth godin wrote:

If you don’t know
who Seth Godin is, you probably
don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a
half dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.”
He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the
world. Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed
me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his
blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make
some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view
point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and
most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners.
I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes
something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a
strong response.

First let’s go over
his position. His post entitled “Shortcuts
That Aren’t So Short” compares SEO to taking short cuts and basically makes
the case you see in the following quote:

“Others spend time
studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to
jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal
links or careful metatags?… Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff,
people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good
for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of
content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people
(being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and
faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.”

Unfortunately, his
position is misleading and can be potentially deadly for your business. I don’t
need to use a theoretical example this time. This problem is so widespread that
I’m going to give a REAL life example I worked on THIS week. That’s right THIS
WEEK! It contradicts all the major purists’ statements against SEO, including
Seth Godin’s. One of my weekly projects is for a financial advisor that just launched
a new website and blog a month ago. The author is a former newspaper
journalist; and he’s off to a prolific blogging start (he posts daily) and his
articles are EXCELLENT. His current traffic level is next to 0.

The problem is his
blog is designed incorrectly. It uses the same title on all the pages and none
of his posts target specific keywords. Additionally, the blog doesn’t ping
anywhere when new posts are added, so none of his posts are showing up on any
of the blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. There are
other issues as well, but that’s a simple beginning of what I’ll be working on
with his site.

Basically his blog
is invisible and nothing except fixing the design problems and targeting
keywords is going to change that. He could continue to write all the GREAT
posts he wants, but no one will be reading them. Why? Google has only indexed
his front page and is never going to rank any of his posts for anything. He has
great content, but no one’s reading it. What does he need? SEO. While I don’t
like using that term, it is appropriate in this instance: he needs an SEO
expert to rework his blogging strategy so his posts and blog rank on Google and
drive new readers and new potential customers to his site. In the next month
I’ll post detailed stats so my readers can see the gigantic traffic increases
that are going to result DIRECTLY from my work with his site.

Not every example
has to involve new sites or even significant design changes to make profitable
gains in the search engine results pages. I recently changed 5 lines in the
.htaccess and robots.txt for a particular website. That’s right, just 5 lines
of code. It resulted in traffic increases of 20% with the raw traffic being 200
more DAILY visitors from Google. That’s a lot of traffic from changing 5 lines.
So what happened? I told Google not to index the duplicate content portions of
a particular website; among other things, this resulted in more page rank
flowing to the internal pages as opposed to being wasted on duplicate content
sections. Yeah, all that from 5 lines!!! Here is a link to a post by Shoe
Money, a famous Internet Marketer and one of the top 100 bloggers according Technorati;
recanting a similar story of changing only a few lines and seeing a big
difference.

Now I’ll illustrate
how SEO can help another HUGE A-list bogger like Seth Godin who already has an
audience. Jason
Calcanis, a very popular blogger, recently blasted SEO as bullshit and was
met with a challenge by Neil Patel that said he could increase the traffic to
Jason’s blog by over 20% by implementing some basic changes within only a few
months. Jason, who already had a popular site, readers and a large audience,
took the bet. Within
two months his traffic was already up 20% and most of the changes
recommended by Neil haven’t even been executed yet. You can read about that
more at the link above. The unfortunate thing about this story is that Jason ended
up getting SEO for free.

So now I’ll give my
challenge (although I doubt he’ll respond) to Seth Godin: pay for my SEO
services and I’ll increase your traffic by 20% or more (probably more like 40%)
in 6 months. If I fail to have gains that substantial, I’ll give Seth all his
money back. With all the increased traffic and subscribers I imagine even Seth
Godin would sell more books and all that by implementing SEO and design
changes.

Imagine if someone
who isn’t already famous, who has to fight to get people to see their blog
posts and is just building their online presence, takes Seth’s advice? They’ll
be shooting themselves in the foot. Sure there are no magic shortcuts; you
can’t just get a bunch of spammy links, but paying attention to keywords and using
a design that encourages optimal search engine optimization has MAJOR positive
effects when the other stuff is right too. It’s not a little thing, it’s huge
and it can be the difference between your business website failing or being
successful online.

Google is not as
“smart” as people seem to think it is. It’s more like a 5 year old. You have to
tell it specially what keywords and what neighborhoods to associate your site
with. It WON’T do this automatically. Lots of sites with great content don’t
have the rankings they deserve, and it’s usually do to SEO, design and
marketing issues as opposed to content quality.

It’s also worth
noting that Seth Godin’s blog is on Typepad and absolutely terribly optimized
for SEO. If he didn’t have such a large pre-built audience, his blog would be
mainly invisible. A few little changes would increase his traffic a ton, even
with all the links and exposure he already has.

Click
Here to read the comments (in the highlighted right sidebar) from Seth
Godin:

Friday, April 20, 2007

Seth Godin spoke
last year at the 2006 Good Experience Live Conference (GEL 2006) and introduced
this notion of “This is Broken”
referencing the blog of the same
name. The talk is entertaining and revealing. Seth is so great at offering
comedian-like insights to the stupidity of large organizations that lose
control over the little things. Those little things in aggregate and sometimes
all on their own can really impact your brand credibility.

It is a 20 minute video and good fun but the underlying
message is take a good look at the details for your brand. Do the things you
are creating add credibility or diminish it. How is your customer service practices
and how are they enhancing all your efforts. Are your efforts to track
consumers actually hindering their user experience? I am sure you can think of hundreds
more.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Blogging is one of the best ways to establish a brand
persona. The tone and quality of your blog is an indicator to your customers,
partners and potential influencer endorsers of the quality and type of
service/product they will receive if they purchase from you.

Your blog becomes and important conduit to many things you
do as a business and entrepreneur. I actually see my blog as a fulcrum of
activity around writing, business acumen, networking and new business
development.

Companies and entrepreneurs can use their blogs to sell you
conceptual ideas matching the trends and happenings in your industry. It can be
a conversation initiator; writing an article that you know will appeal to a
potential customer then inviting them to read it. Or introduce yourself to an
influencer by commenting or re-posting one of their blog posts, or linking to
an article or quote in a publication, then letting them know you did this. These
are brand building tactics around a certain post and the tone and focus of you
blog.

There is an interesting trend on the blogosphere to engage
in what I call “blog duals.” This is where two or more blogs “dis” the other
either personally or philosophically. The philosophical dual is compelling, as
long as it stays at an exchanging ideas and perhaps agreeing to disagree. But
many times it spirals into personal attacks. When it becomes personal, while it
can build a soap opera-like following and spike traffic, what does it do to
that bloggers brand? Some can get away with it and have an extreme
personality-based brand. But most of us can’t pull that off and it will
eventually bite us in the butt (Don Imus anyone?).

So think about what your blog stands for, how does it
represent your brand. Are you using it to the fullest capacity as a networking
and customer building work horse?

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Aziz over at hashout has an interesting idea for
generating links. If another blog writes about him or one of his posts and
links back to the hashout blog he will in turn link back to you. From a
credibility perspective what I like about his approach is his up front honesty
about what he is doing and why. He wants links to increase his search status
which adds credibility and of course drives traffic. Why not… I'll play.

One caveat I will
add is that in order to do strategies like this you should have a good product
to start with. Aziz’s hashout site is great (in fact check out the post about
the alarm clock that runs away from you!). He also has some good rules that
eliminate the not so serious bloggers.

As part of my link building strategy, I am
hereby kicking off the review this blog campaign. You can not only review
HashOut but also you can write or comment about any of the posts on HashOut on
your blog or website and link back to it using appropriate link phrase, to get
a mention of your blog or website and a link back to your post from Hashout, at
the end of the campaign. Not just that! The first 10 reviewers / commentators
will get a full fledged review of their blog or website on HashOut!

Here are some basic rules:

1.You must some where in the post, link back to
this post and

2.Link back to the homepage
(http://hashout.blogspot.com/) or a post on hashout which you are writing
about, using Anchor text only. Do not link back using "Hashout" or
"http://hashout.blogspot.com/" as the anchor text. Either use the
title of the hashout post, you are writing / commenting about, as your anchor
text or be creative and use keywords relevant to the hashout post as your
anchor text.

3.In order to avail the first 10 reviews offer,
your blog needs to be atleast a month old or have a minimum of 30 posts. Sorry,
you just can't expect a review of an empty blog or website.

4.Submit your entries along with your name, a
link to your post and any other information that you may want included in the
link to your blog by April 30, 2007 to the
email address given in the "about" section

Let’s take another look at strategy through an example. As
mentioned in
part one of this series there are objectives (the goal), then the strategy
(what you want to accomplish), then the tactics (how you are implementing the
strategy). Here is a very brief model of how that might look specifically using
and influencer strategy.

Objective is to
increase revenues by 20%

Strategy is to

Engage with industry influencers to endorse the product and increase visibility and credibility.

Identify and elevate several internal spokespersons to influencer level

Leverage high profile customers

Ensure messaging is in alignment with new level of credibility

Higher levels of
credibility allows us to increase the price by 20% (therefore contributing to
the goal/objective)

As mentioned, the strategy illustrated above is an
influencer program. There are other strategies that could be added, such as;
price to value ratios or improving the product based on current market needs
etc., each with its own accompanying tactical programs. The overall complete
plan would in aggregate meet the objective of a 20% increase in sales.

You can see that even the creative aspects including the
advertising are part of an overarching influencer strategy. There can be a lot
of flexibility in the programs as market inflections shift consumer interests,
but the structure of the strategies keeps the focus in alignment with the
objectives. There are many tactical programs that may make themselves available
throughout the course of an annual plan. These need to be included and
incorporated, but done so through the filter of the objectives and the
strategies.

Following is a great exercise in conceptually understanding
strategy and building our strategic thinking muscles. This will take about 15 minutes.
This may seem like an odd activity, but doing it brings a kinesthetic component
to your understanding. We don’t just think with our minds we use imagination
and our bodies and this exercise engages that. Please take some time and do
this, I promise you will gain a new comprehension of strategy and use another
part of your brain that you can apply immediately to the rest of your day. For
this exercise do it in the order presented and don’t read ahead, it will spoil
the surprise.

The following graphic is a Picasso sketch. I want you to
print it out and redraw it. First by putting it beside your piece of paper and
just drawing it by eye, so go try that.

How did that go… unless you are an artist probably not so good?

Now take a new piece of paper for a fresh drawing. Take
Picasso sketch and turn it upside down (the head is at the bottom now). Take
the old sketch and cover up the lower two thirds of the drawing so you are only
seeing the top (which is actually the bottom) of the image. Now recreate the
image by viewing this one third part of the image and slowly move the paper
down to reveal more until you are finished.

Pretty amazing isn’t it. You should have been able to make
that picture look much closer to the original. So what happened here? By only
using the area that you needed to focus on, your brain was able to take in the
relationships between the lines and shapes. That is what strategy is and does.
A sound strategy allows you to focus on a piece of the objective and develop
tactics that are more focused. Strategy is also the relationship between
different elements of business, marketing, messaging, positioning, profit,
margins etc. By taking a look at the relationship between things and not the
whole picture you can start building something that is more organic and usually
more creative.

This may seem like a silly example, but do you remember the
movie “Working Girl” with
Sigourney Weaver, Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith (1988). Well at the end
she was able to show that the idea for a merger came from reading the paper,
and putting together a business “ah ha” from the social pages. She saw the
wedding announcement and another announcement for a potential merger in the
same paper which gave her the idea. That is strategic thinking. So looking at
industry trends and the broader picture then identifying some similarities with
your product and a completely different industry could result in a strategic
partnership that expands both companies’ products. That is strategic thinking.

M-Systems
(recently purchased by Sandisk) was my
client for years. We worked with them on a new category creation strategy,
taking their flash memory disks (USB flash drives) and adding targeted
applications. We called it “smart memory” and it resulted in a consortium
between the two competing companies and is now a successful company U3. U3
delivers solution oriented applications on these devices. That was strategic
thinking. Getting back to the analogy of the drawing, looking at the
relationship between the lines allows you to build something that when combined
becomes a whole picture. It is good to see the whole picture in advance (that
is what the plan is for) but then taking the times to focus on the relationship
between the lines and start seeing patterns and opportunities is what strategy
is all about.

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